The Big Rip-Off / Labels move to block CD audio ripping

Neil McAllister, Special to SF Gate

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, January 31, 2002

Judging by the way the major record labels have been acting lately, you'd think the compact disc was the biggest mistake they ever made. Never mind that the CD format has been outselling audiocassettes since 1991 -- the recording industry seems like it wants those silver discs off the shelves, and it's been working hard to do something about it.

The major labels' latest tactic is a stealthy one. Over the past few months, they've been quietly releasing albums in a new format, one subtly different from the CDs we're accustomed to. Australian singer Natalie Imbruglia's recent album, "White Lilies Island," is a good example. "Those are silver discs with music on them, which resemble CDs but aren't," Klaus Petri told Financial Times Deutschland. And he should know.

Petri is a spokesman for Dutch consumer-electronics maker Philips, one of the co-creators of the compact-disc format. Philips has laid out very precise specifications for what is and isn't an audio compact disc, and only those manufacturers that follow those standards to the letter are permitted to carry Philips' "Compact Disc Digital Audio" logo. According to Petri, these new discs don't qualify.

The difference is that the new discs have Cactus Data Shield, a technology developed by an Israeli software company called Midbar. The Cactus technology intersperses the audio on the disc with invalid digital data, rendering them unplayable in the CD-ROM drives of most home computers.

It's not that the major labels don't appreciate the audio capabilities of your average PC. Rather, Cactus Data Shield represents the latest in digital copy-prevention technology. There's been a lot of talk lately about finding ways to protect intellectual property in the digital age. Well, as it turns out, one of the biggest loopholes in protecting intellectual property is physical property -- those little silver discs themselves.

Most of the complaining about music-copyright infringement has so far centered on file-swapping services like Napster, Gnutella or AudioGalaxy. But the recording industry has an answer for that problem.

New services like PressPlay, MusicNet and the revamped, commercialized Napster aim to give consumers all the convenience of current file-swapping technologies, with the addition of digital rights management (DRM) technologies to prevent unauthorized copying, not to mention a healthy monthly subscription fee. Once the first-generation file-sharing services are sued out of existence, case closed.

In fact, rather than feeling that such services are merely a stopgap measure, some analysts believe they represent an important new profit center for the major labels. "Digital-music subscriptions have the potential to revive the flagging music industry," says Aram Sinnreich of Jupiter Media Metrix in a Reuters report.

Sounds like good news -- but there's just one hitch. So far, it seems that the collective audience for these industry-sponsored audio-download services amounts to -- well -- not much. And who's surprised?

For the vast majority of the music traded on Gnutella or KaZaa, before there was ever an MP3, there was a CD. PCs make it extremely easy to rip and encode the raw audio tracks direct from any CD, often in less time than it takes to play the disc itself. The resulting MP3 files are completely free of DRM, subscription fees, expiration dates or any of the other "features" of a service like PressPlay. So why subscribe?

Copying Countermeasures

The industry's love-hate relationship with the compact disc is nothing new. Almost as soon as digital audio was introduced, the major labels realized they might have made a mistake. To atone for their sins, they successfully lobbied for the passage of the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992.

The market for digital audiotape (DAT) was the first to feel the AHRA's effects. Once it passed, vendors were forbidden to manufacture DAT decks without technologies that prevented tape-to-tape copying. Some say it was this fact that doomed DAT to failure as a consumer audio medium. If a consumer wasn't free to record things with a tape deck, then what use was it?

The same rules applied to all digital audio media, including the later digital compact-cassette format (remember those?) and even Sony MiniDiscs. It wasn't until Diamond Multimedia introduced the Rio MP3 player that a consumer-electronics device would escape the AHRA's restrictions. Diamond successfully argued that the Rio wasn't a digital recording device as defined under the AHRA, because it wasn't actually capable of creating MP3 files itself -- you needed a PC for that.

Unfortunately, PCs themselves can't be classified as digital audio devices. They may be that, but they're also much more, meaning they aren't governed by the AHRA. So now the recording industry has come up with a solution for this problem, as well. It's taking the battle straight to the source: By creating a disc that's unreadable by the CD-ROM drives of most PCs, it can effectively disable most of the MP3 encoding software out there. But the question remains: Will it work?

The motion-picture industry was the first to try software solutions for preventing piracy. The DVD-video format includes not one copy-prevention measure, but two. The first is MacroVision, an analog technology that had previously been used on some VHS tapes. The second is CSS encryption -- and by now, we all know what happened with that.

Though the industry's efforts to block distribution of the DeCSS decryption software are ongoing, the cat is essentially out of the bag. And with the addition of DVD-R burners like the SuperDrive, which ships with Apple Macintosh computers, it seems all that effort was for nothing. It's only the size of most DVD movies -- too big to store on DVD-R media or swap over the Internet -- that keeps them from being more widely copied.

Diminishing Returns

Meanwhile, there's already been word that some audio discs using copy-prevention technologies like Cactus Data Shield have been ripped to MP3. On the other hand, there are also reports that Cactus's corrupt audio-data streams affect other devices besides just computer CD-ROM drives -- which has the CD-audio overseers at Philips none too pleased.

"Because many traditional electronic entertainment devices have drives similar to a PC, problems arise," says Klaus Petri, "particularly with portable devices, auto CD players, DVD players and even traditional CD players." In an interview with Reuters, Gerry Wirtz, Philips's general manager of copyrights, was even less forgiving in his own assessment of the recording industry. "We worry they don't know what they're doing," he said.

The real irony of digital copy-prevention measures is that the industry has invested heavily in these technologies, with monies coming from compact-disc sales. But not only do their measures not have the desired effect (preventing copying), they also produce an inferior product overall -- a distinction not unlike that between a second-generation service like PressPlay and traditional file-sharing networks.

That distinction isn't lost on consumers, either. Public outcry in Europe regarding Natalie Imbruglia's "White Lilies Island" has already led BMG to offer a free trade-in for any consumer who experiences problems playing the disc. The actual cost of the return program to BMG parent Bertelsmann is unknown, but suffice it to say that this seems to be yet another failed experiment in the major labels' history with copy protection.

When will the recording industry get it? For consumers to support a new digital technology, it's going to have to offer them a greater value than what they already have. Instead, we're offered the same inflated prices in return for even more restrictions and ever-less-flexible media.

Fortunately, there is a way you can send a message to the record labels that you won't support their campaign against the compact disc. Until the labels wise up, the remedy is simple: If you go to a record store to buy a CD, and what you bring home looks and sounds like a CD, but isn't -- send it back! (Philips may actually thank you for it.)

Neil McAllister is a San Francisco-based writer and Web developer, a senior editor for Web Techniques magazine, and a regular contributor to SF Gate. nmcallister@sfgate.com